On 28 May 2008 a press conference was held at the Neue
Nationalgalerie in Berlin under the title 'Dubai Erweiterte
Horizonte: Museen schaff en eine neue internationale Öff
entlichkeit' ('Dubai Expanded Horizons: Museums Create a New
International Public Sphere'). It brought together the directors of
the three largest German museums, who referred to themselves during
the press conference as the 'three generals';1 they
were 'flanked' by the Head of the Directorate- General for Culture
and Communication of the Federal Foreign Office and by the Cultural
Director of the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority (DCAA),
representing the Dubai government.

The aim of the event was to make public the plans for a large
scale collaboration project between the three German institutions
(joined under the label 'United German Museums'), the German
cultural diplomacy and the Emirate of Dubai. The wholly unironic
project consisted of the development of a 'Universal museum' to be
located in Dubai, continuing another 'very successful' as they put
it international cooperation between the three institutions and the
National Museum of China in Beijing (which, once the extension work
is completed, will be 'the world's biggest museum').2 This
collaboration will eventually result in the exhibition 'The Art of
the Enlightenment', taking place between September 2010 and
February/March 2012 and which, through a selection of works and
artefacts from the museum collections from Berlin, Dresden and
Munich, will present the Enlightenment as a key chapter in the
history of European thought and civilisation and, furthermore, will
aim to 'redefine the Enlightenment and China as forming part of a
universal "intellectual world-heritage site"'. After this first
experiment, the 'United German Museums' will expand

Footnotes

Peter Klaus Schuster of the National Museums of Berlin, Martin
Roth of the Dresden State Art Collections and Reinhold Baumstark of
the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich.↑

Several recent German publications have addressed these issues,
such as Texte zur Kunst's December 2009 issue, which was
titled 'Geschichte/History', or the latest issue of
Jahresring from 2009, edited by Yilmaz Dziewior, 'Wessen
Geschichte: Vergangenheit in der Kunst der Gegenwart'. There have
also been several exhibitions dedicated to re-enactment, including
'History Will Repeat Itself' at HMKV Dortmund and Kunst-Werke
Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin in 2007-08 and 'Life, Once
More. Forms of Re-enactment in Contemporary Art', at Witte de With
Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, in 2005. For a historical
overview see Sven Lütticken: 'An Arena in Which to Reenact', in S.
Lütticken (ed.), Life, Once More: Forms of Re-enactment in
Contemporary Art (exh. cat.), Rotterdam: Witte de With, 2005,
pp.17-60. In a recent article, Kerstin Stakemeier claims that
re-enactment is 'performed historicism', and as such always assumes
that mere repetition already bears a critical dimension. On the
contrary, Stakemeier claims that 'artistic re-enactment transforms
actualisation into a symbolic dissolution, where the past is
stylised into an event and becomes indistinguishable'.
Re-enactments are then 'historicist anesthetisations of the
political'. Kerstin Stakemeier, 'Reenacting: aneignen und
abweisen', phase 2, issue 32, 2009, available at http://phase2.nadir.org/rechts.php?artikel=691
(last accessed on 16 February 2010).↑

Creischer, Siekmann and von Borries also helped initiate the
critical platform 'Alexandertechnik' (ironically referring to
Alexander von Humboldt), which reflects on the political changes
conducted through the urban and cultural planning of the former
centre of East Berlin. The new Humboldt Forum, for example, which
is meant to represent the culturally and politically reunited
German nation, celebrates the role of non-European art and culture
artefacts in the enlightened project of cosmopolitanism set up by
the 'cultural nation' Germany to peacefully colonise the world by
'exchanging' cultural goods, i.e. by exporting German
Bildung (cultivation) and importing the 'primitive art'
that now constitutes the ethnological collections. The bust of
Nefertiti exhibited in the recently and spectacularly re-opened
Neues Museum on the Museumsinsel is perhaps the most popular
example. For more information, see http://www.humboldtforum.info
(last accessed on 16 February 2010).↑

The Phonogram Archive, co-founded by Carl Stumpf, is a
collection of fragments of non-European music recorded during
colonial expeditions by Germans and Europeans to different parts of
the world, with aspirations to being comprehensive. The archive and
especially its historical collection, which has been classified by
the UNESCO as a Memory of the World, is today part of the
musical-ethnological collection in the Ethnological Museum in
Berlin, and preserves over 150,000 audio documents recorded between
1883 and 1954, mainly during the colonial expeditions. An
interesting view on this archive is presented by Philip Scheffner
in his film Halfmoon Files (2007), which focuses on the
recordings of Islamic war prisoners from the so-called 'Halfmoon
Camp' near Berlin during World War I.↑

Leitkultur ('leading culture') refers to the consensual
agreement on the fundamental values for society, and was a key
discussion point during the German political debate on the
modification of the regulations for the integration of immigrants
in 2000. The conservatives claimed that immigrants had to respect
and adopt the German 'leading culture'. This position was
criticised as replacing integration by assimilation, and therefore
not respectful of the diverse cultural reality of German
society.↑

The major issue for Stumpf and his archive was how to notate
non-European music, which was impossible with the classical
notation system and its diatonic scale. The classification of the
music was thus done through its degree of deviance from the Western
notation system, which implies that the music is not classified as
part of the 'history of music', but as ethnological illustrations
of a certain cultural and historical moment and consequently
exposed as part of the 'ethnological' collection.↑

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